1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to in-store fulfillment for retail stores and, more particularly, to a system for improving order batching using location information of items in a retail store and method of using same.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, order fulfillment may refer to a complete process from point-of-sales inquiry to delivery of an item or product to a customer. In the context of a physical store, in-store fulfillment may refer to a process from receiving a customer notification, e.g., ordering an item or product via the Internet, for store pick up or delivery to the customer. This process may require a number of tasks including, for example, locating the item in the store's inventory, moving the item to a point of sales of the retail store, and staffing to ensure there is manpower to consummate the sale when the customer arrives at the retail store.
Current in-store picking involves global integrated fulfillment (GIF) systems that batch orders based on their priority (due time and order placement time) with static constraints such as a maximum number of orders in one pick-walk by staff of the retail store. These batch orders are limited by time of day and are known in advance. The batch orders are separated by load number (e.g., truck) and due times (e.g., 9:00 a.m.) and the separate orders are batched into different commodities or items (e.g., frozen). A staff or “picker” receives a number of batch orders and then walks through the retail store to retrieve the items and fill a tote with the items from the batch orders on a first-come-first basis.
Traditionally, store systems use sequence numbers of items to identify the pick sequence for a given set of orders. However this may involve inefficient use of the picker in walking the retail store to retrieve the items.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide a new system and method that improves order batching using location information of items in a retail store. It is also desirable to provide a new system and method that uses exact item location using (X, Y) co-ordinates for improving batching of orders to generate optimal pick paths within the retail store. It is further desirable to provide a new system and method that uses XY data to provide an optimal pick path for picking the items/products within the retail store. Thus, there is a need in the art to provide a system for improving order batching using location information of items in a retail store and method of using same that meets at least one of these desires.